Pixel Juice

'So, Tape,' starts the pigman, 'I hear you've been having a spot of bother.'

'Nothing I can't handle.'

'Not what I heard. What I heard, your brain's being eaten. What I heard, your tapeworm's set to erase. Can't be nice, losing all those lovely memories. You tried the Patent Office?'

'Sure. They claim it's my fault. Been feeding it the wrong stuff, they reckon.'

'Bunch of pures! They're happy enough to pay us for the experiments, but when it comes to back-up, eh? Nothing at all. Now one of my boys, his pig-part started playing up. Starting taking big chunks out of him. Wasn't pretty, not at all. Took ages to get the stains out.' Here, he lovingly smoothed his leopardskin sofa. The sofa purred deeply and arched its back to receive the strokes. 'I paid for the operation, of course. Bootleg doctor.'

'What happened?'

'Successful, if rather ugly. Of course, I had to lay the man off. I mean, what use is a man without some pig inside him? Isn't that right, baby?'

The girl let her furry tail rest teasingly on Mr Pork's giant thigh, although whether she was teasing him, or me, I couldn't say.

'The thing is,' the pig continued, 'I'd rather have you on my side, than fighting against me. After all, there's only so many patents with the fishing gift. What do you say? You want that operation?'

'It's a kind offer, Mr Pork, but… I'm happier alone, you know? Lone wolf.'

'I knew a lone wolf once, proper one. Strange guy, couldn't stop howling at the moon. Had to have him put down in the end.' With that, he pressed a button on his tortoise table and the whole tramcat purred into life. The room rocked slightly as the vehicle unfolded its legs. Even the table was surprised: it made a dash for the door, maybe half a millimetre an hour. I wasn't quite that fast.

'Hey, what is this?' From the window I could see we were moving away from the casino.

'Please, Mr Worm, do sit down. You'll have an accident.'

I was already thinking about the accident I would be having, and maybe of trying for Pinky and Perky, maybe ripping both those squealers off at the root, when the pigboys come cruising through the door, sweaty and heavy, and the next bit the worm has already taken, taken into darkness.

That's why I have to write this down, to try and capture the story before it disappears.

Out of the darkness, I remember ru

Climbing wasn't something I'd gone in for lately, but I was dragged along by the fear. The vats were the size of churches and open at the top, with an observation platform around the outside edge. Looking down made me feel sick because a lump of something was swimming around in there. God knows what. So I turned to look back over the other side.

The pigboys were in deep-trough mode of course, because have you ever seen a pig climb a ladder? One of them pulled out a gun. The metal below me was punched through by the bullet, and a stream of the soup came spewing out of the vat. Somebody screamed down there as the stuff hit them. Then the tramcat starts to climb the vat, and would have done OK if Pork hadn't been so extravagant with the on-board accessories. One second the vehicle was creeping up towards me, the next overhanging itself as the patio and miniature golf course on its back slowly shifted the centre of gravity.

Like any cat through history it tried to land on its feet, doing that mid-air dance-craze twist that nearly always worked. Nearly always… but this time its dug-in claws took a side of the vat with them. Too much weight.

We didn't stay to hear the cries of the pigboys as the whole soup came down that night. Monkey Funk just took my hand and together we jumped from vat to vat, from species to species, from darkness to darkness to…

I've just read the above entry to Monkey. Every night we do this, me reading from the old diaries as the memories fade away, her trying to put the past together for me. She claims she was a childhood friend of mine, that we used to go stealing fish from the vats when we were young, and that's why she'd rescued me from the Pork, but I have to take her word for it.

I have to take everybody's word for it these days.

It's strange, but I'm quite ready for the day when the worm takes everything. I don't even think about the operation any more. I don't know, maybe the worm's doing me good. Just to live, forever now. Yeah, whatever. But reading the diaries is frustrating, and this may well be my last journey back. There's too many things I read about, they don't make sense any more.

I can't remember what Kid Signal looks like, for instance, and what the hell is a hyperdice? So far gone, I can't even remember what I look like myself, without the use of a mirror, or the look in Monkey's eyes as we kiss.

And all the stories disappear, one by one by one…

PIXEL DUB JUICE